33-3 Native Women's Hidden Reality

Film Review: Being Innu

A film by Catherine Mullins76 Minutes, 2007 | English and Innu versions | Distributed by Documentary Educational ResourcesBeing Innu should be required viewing in every school in North America. Better than almost any other film it depicts the reality that Native peoples live under in many places and the devastating consequences of cultural hegemony, and it does it in a way that is…

I Dreamed the Animals: A Hunter's Journal

I was born at Emish [Voisey’s Bay] close to the salt water in Labrador. I was just a little boy when we moved to Upatik [Okpatik Island area]. I spent most of my life with my parents in Upatik, and I still go back to there. Sometimes I visit my father’s campsite, but it’s hard to see it because it’s all covered with grass and moss. Once, in the summer, we didn’t have anything to eat. One night my…

Short Shrift: A Photo Essay

In early 2008 Dutch photojournalist Marielle van Uitert traveled to Rwanda to document the lives of Batwa people, also known as Pygmies. Rwanda was ravaged by genocide in 1994, and the scars of that conflict still mark the country, but the Batwa, who were marginalized before the genocide, have suffered even more than most. They lost a far greater proportion of their population than other ethnic…

The Other Way of Knowing

Western science and Indigenous worldviews are often seen as incompatible, with the Indigenous view usually being far less valued by society at large. But an inside look at Indigenous ways of knowing shows that they offer unique and dependable insights, in precisely the areas where Western science is often weakest.  I grew up in a family where Bible study was mandatory. Yet, despite the firm…

Freedom Foods

Food does more than nourish our bodies. It lifts our spirits, nurtures our minds, and comforts our souls. As any weary traveler who has ever longed for a home-cooked meal can attest, food connects us to our families and communities by reminding us where we come from and—just for a moment—transports us back to a place of familiarity, trust, and comfort. But in many Indigenous communities across…

Helping Survivors Survive

The numbers are staggering: according to the Department of Justice, Native American women experience violent crime three-and-a-half times more often than the national average, and one-third of Native American women will be sexually assaulted in their lives. As horrific as that sounds, the problem may, in fact, be even worse than these official statistics suggest, as 70 percent of all rapes…

Melting the Ice in the Hearts of Men

In my Inuit culture we believe that of all the things that can be created the only one that will disappear before your eyes is smoke. And as the smoke comes to you it has the power to carry away with it any bad things you have in you—bad thoughts, bad things we see, bad things we hear, bad things we say, bad things we feel, and bad things we smell. The smoke carries all of that away from us. And…

Comic Relief

Steven Keewatin Sanderson, a Plains Cree illustrator and animator, is one of the few Native comic book artists working anywhere. A self-taught artist, he has become a force to reckon with, having developed a number of comics with Native superheroes as well as producing his own animated films, working on hit cartoons for the Cartoon Network and Disney’s computer game Treasure Planet: Battle at…